Macro shots ahoy!

Last night's shooting went well. I was working with the lightbox, the 60mm Macro, my new 580EX II Speedlite and a Sto-Fen Omnibounce for diffusion. All in the all the results were good, and I had a lot of work adjusting the flash power on the fly. I really learned a lot fromt his shoot, and by the end I was snapping proper exposures on the first shot or two.

I have a lot of post processing to do on the shots still, but I have two samples to share at the moment.

These shots are of wargaming miniatures, and they were painted by my friend Paul of Saber's Edge Hobbies and Games. Really this is not a display of my photography, but of Paul's painting skill. For reference, these figures are only 28mm tall.

First up, everyone's favorite scalliwags, a band o' murderous pirates!



Controlling depth of field was key here, and I was shooting most shots at somewhere between f/8 and f/16 to try and get focus across all the figures. This meant using fairly high power on the flash (anywhere from 1/8th to full power), and long exposures. My tripod and cable release were critical here. This shot was at f/9, 1/8th second exposure at ISO 200.

I was playing with depth of field on some shots though, and I like the effect it gave on larger groups of models or larger individual models, like in this shot:



This bad boy is a Space Wolves Dreadnaught from the Warhammer 40,000 wargame. This is a larger model, probably 40mm or more in height, so there is more detail and more to get in focus. As such, I thought about some DoF effects, and came up with the shot above, focused in on the claw and let the remainder of model fall into bokeh. I think it worked, and I like the shot. For comparison, this was shot at f/2.8, 1/40th second exposure at ISO 800.

More pics will follow as soon as I have time for post processing.